Client Relations

This is FindLaw's Law Firm Management Center's collection of free articles on Client Relations. Managing the client relationship is a core issue and challenge facing all law firms. Clients are key to the sustainability of your law practice. Issues like client intake, communication, case updates, customer surveys, and holiday gifts are all parts of Client Relations. Are you catering to one of your most important business assets? Could you service your clients better? Start your research with FindLaw.

A lawyer who has been practicing for any length of time at all no doubt has encountered the "difficult" client. This is not necessarily the client who simply presents a difficult case with complex legal issues, the client who stops paying a lawyer's bills as it nears bankruptcy or even the client who involves the lawyer in conflict of interest or ethics problems.

Unless your practice is a strictly pro bono enterprise, your law firm is a business and should be treated as such. Therefore, at the end of the day, one of your practice's primary concerns should be profitability. To be profitable, your practice needs clients. But more importantly, for long-term viability, your practice needs to retain these clients.

Within a business, there are few things worse than getting slapped with the dreaded lawsuit. Not only are lawsuits expensive, but they can be time-consuming, draining and frustrating. So how do you avoid one?

Often, I am asked my opinion about the single most effective marketing strategy a law firm can implement. And the more involved I become in the business of marketing legal services, the more certain I am in my reply. Without exception, the answer is, "Ask your clients for feedback and respond to what they say." It's just that simple.

Provided by Alan S. Gutterman of Gutterman Law & Business
When counseling the "new client" you will need to obtain as much information as possible about the business and operations of the client so that you will be able to start making a contribution as quickly as possible.

Provided by Alan S. Gutterman of Gutterman Law & Business
As you go through your client's documents, you should develop your own "executive summary" that includes the information that will be most essential to your activities and which you will need to know as you communicate with executives, managers and outside business partners.

Provided by U.S. Small Business Administration
The Golden Rule, "do unto others as you would have them do unto you," may seem self-evident in the way we try to conduct our personal lives. Yet this axiom is assuming new importance as a guiding principle in the world of business.